The 2013 U.S. government shutdown as a result of partisan battles over fiscal issues is creating ripples across the country, and federal workers of all kinds are being told not to report to work. What might things look like in the coming days and weeks? What does the research say?

As the U.S. financial crisis unfolded, President Bush and members of Congress authorized on Oct. 3, 2008, a rescue package called the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Many policymakers believed that the U.S. economy was, in the words of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, on the verge of ‘‘a cataclysm that could have rivaled or surpassed the Great Depression.’’

In recent years, the issue of ballooning national debt has surfaced in a variety of countries around the world, and the United States, of course, is no exception.

Recent research has produced a variety of theories and insights that apply to this issue, and much academic scholarship looks to draw lessons from economic history. Here are some relevant studies and working papers.

U.S. policymakers find themselves engaged in an often intractable and largely polarized debate about the size of government and its relationship to overall economic growth. A cause (or perhaps symptom) of this partisan polarization is a number of studies with highly variable results on the impact of government size on economic growth.